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Antonio Gago
João Goulão is the doctor who spearheaded Portugal’s radical drug decriminalization policy. After participating in the resistance movement that launched Portugal’s 1974 democratic revolution, he became a doctor in the southern Algarve region, where tourism was fueling a significant heroin addiction problem. When he saw that criminalizing drug use only made addiction worse, he created an addiction treatment center. Eventually, the Portuguese government selected him to run the nation’s drug policy, and he designed a system that dedicates resources to reintegrating drug addicts into society and providing them with services, rather than marginalizing and criminalizing them. He helped design outreach services for street addicts, free treatment centers and “therapeutic communities” for recovering drug users, and effective drug education programs for Portuguese schools. These interventions have dramatically reduced addiction, overdose deaths, teenage drug use, HIV infections, and drug-related crime in Portugal.
João Goulão Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by João Goulão or refer to João Goulão . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 16
Quotes
In his office, Goulão told me there were two dimensions to Portugal’s drug revolution. The panel didn’t simply lift the legal penalties and leave people to it. They took the big, lumbering machinery of the drug war and turned it into an equally big, active machine to establish a drug peace. “The big effect of decriminalization,” he said, “was to make it possible to develop all the other policies.” In the United States, 90 percent of the money spent on drug policy goes to policing and punishment, with 10 percent going to treatment and prevention. In Portugal, the ratio is the exact opposite.
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João Goulão Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by João Goulão or refer to João Goulão . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 16
Quotes
In his office, Goulão told me there were two dimensions to Portugal’s drug revolution. The panel didn’t simply lift the legal penalties and leave people to it. They took the big, lumbering machinery of the drug war and turned it into an equally big, active machine to establish a drug peace. “The big effect of decriminalization,” he said, “was to make it possible to develop all the other policies.” In the United States, 90 percent of the money spent on drug policy goes to policing and punishment, with 10 percent going to treatment and prevention. In Portugal, the ratio is the exact opposite.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
